Zadruga

by Margaret Pemberton

  ‘I’ll never be so foolish again,’ she said sincerely as Bella settled herself comfortably at her feet, ‘never.’

  Still he didn’t move; still he didn’t speak.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘Truly I am. And I’m sorry about the baby. I know it will make things difficult…’

  At last he found his voice. ‘Sweet Christ!’ he said, and his voice was the voice of a stranger. ‘You’ve been having an affair for over three years and you’re sorry!’

  ‘Yes. I wish it had never happened. I wish I had never met him. I wish…’

  ‘And you think the baby will make things difficult?’

  As his eyes held hers she was filled with sudden uncertainty. Just as her disclosure to Nicky about the baby had not gone the way she had anticipated, so this conversation was not going the way she had anticipated either.

  ‘We can’t live together any longer,’ he said harshly. ‘You realize that, don’t you?’

  He could see by the expression on her face that she had realized no such thing.

  ‘It would be easier, all things considered, if I moved into a pied à terre,’ he continued, the skin tight across his cheekbones, his lips bloodless, ‘that way it will be far less disruptive for Stephen…’

  ‘I can’t live here with your parents on my own! Not with them knowing you’d left me!’ She felt faint at the very thought. ‘Your mother loathes me! She thinks I’m not remotely good enough for you…’

  Her voice tailed away.

  He didn’t trouble to state the obvious: that his mother had been absolutely right. He said instead, ‘The scandal of a formal separation or a divorce would cause my mother even further distress and so, for her sake, I’m not going to instigate any such proceedings. I shall spend as much time with Stephen as possible and I shall accept the first posting abroad that I am offered. I shall then expect Stephen, in the care of his nanny, to visit me two or three times a year.’

  His voice was cold and impersonal, the change in him as deep and catastrophic as the change that had taken place in Katerina.

  She said unsteadily, ‘I don’t want us to live apart. I want us to be friends again …’

  ‘Friends!’ A spasm crossed his ravaged, grief-stricken face. ‘I’m your husband, for Christ’s sake! I knew you weren’t in love with me when you married me, but our relationship since has been so … so …’ He couldn’t speak of their lovemaking, the pain was too great. When he could continue he said, ‘I couldn’t see how we could have been so happy, so compatible, unless you had fallen in love with me.’

  Passion had again entered his voice and with a physical effort that was obvious he checked himself, exercising a control that totally unnerved her, saying in a hard, scarcely recognizable voice, ‘Eventually, of course, you will have to move out of Cambridge Gate and I will find somewhere suitable for you. Eventually, too, when Stephen is older and at preparatory school, I shall expect him to spend his school vacations with me.’

  Natalie felt beads of sweat break out on her forehead. Of all the nightmares she had endured; the news of her permanent banishment from Serbia; the loss of Katerina’s love and friendship; the knowledge that her affair with Nicky was at an end, the one she was now enduring was the worst.

  With Julian by her side she could have survived any of the previous hells she had been plunged into. Without him, nothing would be bearable. For the first time and far, far too late, she realized how truly necessary he was to her. From out of nowhere came the line in the Bible about Esau selling his birthright for a mess of potage. That was what she had done. She had forfeited the most precious thing she possessed or ever would possess, Julian’s respect and love, for the dross of a cheap, shabby, sexual adventure.

  Suddenly, as they continued to face each other, it was as if scales literally fell from her eyes. He was the handsomest man she had ever seen, far handsomer than Nicky with his over-obvious, Byronic, gypsy attractiveness. He was also the kindest and most generous-hearted man she had ever met. Even now, when she least deserved it, he was being generous towards her in not insisting on a divorce.

  Self-knowledge descended on her like a physical burden, making her gasp beneath its weight. She had always thought of him as her best and dearest friend and now she realized that he was much, much more. He was the man she loved. The man she had loved for years.

  The ground seemed to shift beneath her feet as her world tilted on its axis and rearranged itself. How could she have been so criminally blind? So monumentally stupid? She remembered the passionate, unrestrained response he had aroused in her when they had consummated their marriage; the desperate eagerness with which she had greeted him at the station when he had returned from officer training; the agony she had suffered when she hadn’t known if it had been him, or Edward, who had been massacred in Flanders. Of course she loved him. He was handsome and kind and honourable and no woman in her right senses could be anything else but in love with him. He made her laugh, he brought her joy in bed, and until now he had never failed to comfort her whatever her distress. And in return she had betrayed his trust in the most crucifying and terrible way possible.

  With all her heart she wanted to put into words the love she felt for him and she knew, if she did so, he would not believe her. She had left it far too late and a protestation of love now would merely seem a tawdry attempt to avoid the future he had so starkly set out for her.

  As she struggled to think of how she could narrow the chasm dividing them he said tightly, ‘I don’t think there is anything more we can possibly say to each other, is there?’ and without waiting for a reply, his eyes bloodshot with pain, he turned on his heel, walking away from her just as Katerina had walked away from her in Nice.

  As the door closed behind him she sat down slowly on the edge of the bed. He had gone and she knew that he was never going to share the room with her ever again. Bella whimpered at her feet and Natalie picked her up, hugging her close.

  Early evening merged into night and still she remained sitting on the bed, lost in a private hell of her own making, impaled by

  the past, paralysed by the present, unable to conceive of the future.

  Three days later the downstairs maid approached her as she returned from taking Stephen for his morning walk.

  ‘Mr Fielding is in the drawing-room and would like you to join him, Madam,’ she said dutifully.

  Asking her to take Stephen back to his nursery and nanny, Natalie apprehensively entered the drawing-room. To her vast relief it was empty save for Julian.

  He had had his back towards her and had been looking out of the window towards the park when she had entered the room. Now, his shoulders tense, a pulse throbbing at his jawline, he turned to face her.

  She wanted to ask him where he had been for the last three nights and what explanation he had given to his parents for his absence but was too nervous as to what it was he wished to say to her, to speak first.

  He said tautly, ‘I’ve been given a posting and will be leaving Britain at the end of the week.’

  Shock stabbed through her. She hadn’t doubted for a minute that he had been serious when he had said he was going to accept the first posting offered him but she had not expected it to be so soon. Now, as their eyes held, all her fierce hopes that somehow they would be reconciled before he left the country, and that consequently he might not leave at all, perished.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked, remembering how passionately determined she had been that she would never accompany him anywhere but Belgrade and ironically aware that if he were to ask her to accompany him now she would do so with a singing heart, even if the posting were to Timbuktu or deepest China.

  He paused awkwardly for a moment, his hair burnished the colour of ripe wheat by the spring sunlight streaming through the window behind him and then, very reluctantly, he said simply, ‘Belgrade.’

  Chapter Nineteen

  When Katerina walked out of Natalie’s bedroom at the Negresco she did so feelin
g more bereft than she had ever done before in her life. Ever since she could remember Natalie had been not only her sister but her best friend, and now that friendship was at an end.

  When she reached her own room she closed the door behind her and sat down on the edge of the bed. Not only was it at an end but she was the one who had ended it. Tears blinded her eyes. She had had no option. Natalie’s betrayal of Julian’s love and care for her was too gross an act for forgiveness. Even worse had been Natalie’s complete blindness as to the enormity of her selfishness and stupidity.

  She thought back to Natalie’s happy belief that Gavrilo and his friends could plot and plan the downfall of the Habsburg empire without occasioning anyone any physical harm. Her blindness then had been stunning and even after all the catastrophic events which had followed in the wake of her friendship with Gavrilo, it was still stunning.

  As she sat thinking back over their childhood she wondered if perhaps she and her parents were partly to blame for Natalie’s inability to see events in any way other than the way she wanted them to be. Perhaps they should have been harsher with her whenever her dauntless optimism had led her far from the path of grim reality. She remembered Natalie’s sparkling vivacity and knew that they couldn’t have done so, that any attempt to crush her sunny buoyancy would have seemed unnecessarily cruel.

  All through the long journey back to Belgrade the grief of her severed relationship with Natalie stayed with her. Her mother, unaware of its cause and assuming it to be the same grief she herself felt at the prospect of Natalie’s long exile, did not distress her more by speaking about it.

  Katerina was grateful. Not only was the journey long but, as their train entered Serbia, it was almost unbearably painful. Fields were devastated and denuded of crops, bridges were burned, towns had been reduced to shell-shattered ruins. As she looked out of the carriage window Katerina felt sick at heart. It was going to take years, perhaps even a decade, before her war-ravaged country was the country it had been before the war.

  As they entered Belgrade it was hard to recognize it. Nearly every public building had been either destroyed or badly damaged.

  ‘But it will all be rebuilt,’ Zita said, reading her thoughts. ‘And when it is, Belgrade will be as splendid as Geneva or Paris.’

  Katerina was sure it would be but as the train began to slow down she had other thoughts on her mind.

  ‘Will Papa be at the station to meet us?’ she asked urgently, buttoning Peter’s coat and smoothing his hair. ‘Will he have received your telegram telling him when we left Nice?’

  ‘Goodness knows,’ Zita said, struggling to lower the carriage-window. ‘I suspect the telegraph services are as war-ravaged as everything else and I rather doubt if my telegram will have travelled any further east than Geneva. However, if Papa has received it he will certainly be waiting for us.’

  The window finally slid down and she leaned out, holding her hat on with a lilac-gloved hand.

  ‘Is he there, Mama?’ Katerina asked, squeezing next to her, holding her own hat on with both hands. ‘Can you see him?’

  ‘No … not yet …’ The train began to slide into the station and suddenly she cried, ‘Yes! He’s there, Katerina! He’s there!’

  For both of them it was a moment of sheer, unadulterated joy. The instant the train stopped they tumbled from the carriage, wings on their heels as they ran with an elated Peter down the crowded platform to where he was waiting for them.

  They had all already been reunited once, in Corfu, but this reunion was no less special for now they were together again on Serbian soil.

  ‘How is Natalie?’ was the first question he asked of them when they had hugged and kissed and hugged again.

  ‘She’s very well,’ Zita said, a tell-tale underlying tremor in her voice, ‘but Julian hadn’t told her of her exile. He hadn’t wanted anything to spoil our reunion in Nice and had been going to tell her when they returned to London …’

  ‘But she knows now?’ Alexis interrupted anxiously, ‘Julian has told her now?’

  ‘It was Katerina who first told her.’ Zita’s gloved hands were still tightly clasped in his. ‘Julian tried to cheer her by telling her that no matter where they might find themselves living, he would see to it that we all meet up as a family every year.’

  ‘But not in Belgrade,’ Alexis said heavily.

  Her fingers tightened on his. ‘No, my darling,’ she said gently, ‘not in Belgrade.’

  As she watched her parents drawing comfort at the prospect of family reunions she knew would never take place, Katerina could hardly bear it. The war had taken its toll on both of them. The long arduous winter crossing of the mountains had prematurely aged her mother and her father’s once upright figure was stooped with rheumatism after his years of living in water-logged trenches. They had suffered enough and they didn’t deserve to suffer any further.

  With a hurting heart Katerina wondered when Natalie would break the news to them that she was leaving Julian and that she would soon be giving birth to another man’s child. An emotion she had never thought possible engulfed her. She was glad that Sandro had permanently exiled Natalie for if he hadn’t done so, and if Natalie had returned to Belgrade with her lover, their parents’ shame would have been so deep Katerina doubted if either of them would have survived it.

  Her father put an end to her sombre reverie by throwing an arm lovingly around her shoulders and saying, ‘Let’s go home. The house is war-damaged and looted and, when I first returned, was filthy. Fortunately Laza came back a few weeks ago and immediately organized a massive clean-up operation.’

  As they began to walk out of the station he said with a slight, disbelieving shake of his head, ‘He lost an arm fighting the Bulgarians and was worried that I wouldn’t re-employ him. Can you imagine that? I told him that he would have a home and employment with us for as long as he wanted and that I hoped that would be for the rest of his life.’

  ‘And Cissie?’ Katerina asked as she helped Peter step into a landau shabby from lack of use, the Vassilovich coat of arms barely discernible on its door. ‘Is Cissie here as well?’

  He nodded. ‘She arrived five days ago after sailing from Corfu to Athens and then travelling through Greece and Montenegro. Why she chose to undertake such a journey when she could have travelled with you and Mama to Nice and then continued on to England with Natalie and Julian, I can’t imagine.’

  ‘Her parents are dead and she only has very distant relatives in England,’ Katerina said as their coachman cracked his whip and the landau began to roll and bump over the cobbles. ‘She thinks of Belgrade as her home and all the suffering she endured there during the occupation has bonded her even more closely to it.’

  ‘Helga thought of Belgrade as her home, too,’ Zita said quietly.

  Alexis put his hand comfortingly over hers. ‘The first thing I did on my return was to have Helga’s body removed from the city cemetery and re-interred in the family mausoleum.’

  She squeezed his hand gratefully. There had been times when she had wondered if bad memories would make her return home unendurable. Now, looking around at her ruined, shell-bombarded city, she knew that despite everything that had happened it was still the only place in the world she wanted to be.

  Katerina, too, was profoundly grateful to be home. The Austrians, Hungarians, Germans and Bulgars might have destroyed ninety-five per cent of the public buildings but they had been powerless to destroy its magnificent setting. The Sava and Danube still curled magnificently around it, the Kalemegdan heights and ancient citadel still overlooked it. She held Peter’s hand tightly, pointing out to him all the landmarks, wanting him always to remember the moment when he, too, returned home.

  ‘Rumour has it that King Peter is not going to return, to Belgrade, at least not in the foreseeable future,’ Cissie said to her next day as together they began to white-wash the room that had once been Cissie’s bedroom and that the Austrians had used as a storage room for munitions.

/>   ‘But I thought he was here already!’ Katerina exclaimed, putting down her brush and resting her aching arm. ‘Where is he, if he isn’t here?’

  A strand of Cissie’s mousy-brown hair had escaped from her protective dust-cap and she tucked it away before it got splashed with white-wash. ‘He’s in Greece and it’s common gossip on the streets that he’s going to remain there indefinitely.’

  Katerina was stunned. It had never occurred to her that the king wasn’t back in the city and in residence at the Konak.

  ‘But why?’ she asked, picking up her brush again, smudges of white-wash on her forehead and cheeks.

  Cissie shrugged. ‘Who knows? You might as well ask why Princess Hélène has chosen to remain in Switzerland.’

  ‘There’s no point. No-one knows,’ Katerina said practically, beginning to once again apply white-wash to the walls. ‘Prince Paul isn’t in Greece as well, is he?’

  Cissie shook her head. ‘No, I’ve seen him in the city two or three times.’ She paused for a moment, and then said, ‘Max Karageorgevich entered the city with the Prince Regent, but there’s gossip that he’s no longer here.’

  Katerina’s brushstroke faltered slightly and then she said with apparent disinterest, ‘He has a Greek wife now and has perhaps returned to Greece.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ Cissie said non-committally, wondering why Katerina always reacted so oddly whenever Max Karageorgevich’s name was mentioned.

  That evening after dinner Katerina said to her father, ‘Papa, why hasn’t Uncle Peter returned home? Cissie says there are rumours on the streets that he doesn’t intend doing so.’

  ‘I don’t think he does,’ her father replied equably, ‘at least not for some time.’

  ‘But why?’ Katerina persisted. ‘I thought there would have a been a glorious state entry and all sorts of celebrations.’

  ‘Have you looked at the people in the streets?’ Alexis asked gently. ‘Have you seen the throngs of young men crippled and maimed? The number of women in mourning for sons and husbands and fathers? The war may be over but lavish celebrations are out of place. As for why Peter hasn’t returned, I think the reason is that he doesn’t feel like a king any more, nor does he want to be one. He handed all the responsibilities of kingship to Alexander long ago. He’s an old man who has been made even older by his valiant participation in the fighting. What he needs now is rest and peace and he certainly won’t find either in Belgrade at the moment.’